Reviewing Ben Lerner’s new book of poetry, The Lights (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Granta) in the New Yorker, Kamran Javadizadeh writes:
In Angle of Yaw (2006), Lerner began to experiment with prose poems, not unlike the child he describes in one of them: “If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy.” Just so, the “built spaces” of prose allowed Lerner to play with the poetry they seemed once to contain, to draw potential pleasures into existence.
It’s a brilliant insight into the deferred aesthetic pleasure that many prose poems offer: the feeling that something’s in there, the expectation of a shining discovery among the sentences that will flash like the electric charge of linebreaks in lyric verse.
It speaks to me both as the editor of an anthology of prose poetry and a lover of cardboard boxes since childhood. Even now, I find it hard to put a well-made cuboid into the recycling: what lightness and solidity in its lidded construction, what collections of scattered things it might cargo through time!
The reality of this means my workspace is often piled high with boxes — and, of course, poetry books. So I thought I’d turn to the latter to recommend some recent prose poems from UK publishers which play with the idea that their words once contained or framed something we might recognise as “real” poetry.
James Tate, Hell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems (Carcanet, 2023)
Once upon a time, the prose poem was a rare creature to spot in the wild of a British bookshop. One of my first sightings was in 1999, when I picked up a copy of Simon Armitage’s just-published anthology of short poems, Short and Sweet (Faber), and read:
Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ‘bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
It’s a single paragraph that became Tate’s signature poem, and a perfect example of the “soft surrealism” of much American prose poetry in the latter part of the twentieth century. A heroic subject — Christ’s descent into hell between crucifixion and resurrection — becomes a casual anecdote, as light as a coffee cup. And in its lightness is its loveliness: for wouldn’t the resurrection of the body be the lifting of the burden of earth and darkness, the realisation of a world where “hell” is just a sound someone makes when they’re happy? An empty box can be a beautiful thing.
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